Mailbox

Inbox that made email light, fast, and mobile-friendly.

Description

Mailbox launched in early 2013 and was able to gather over 1 million registrations for its trial plan.
The app promised to make your inbox more manageable, fast and efficient. It introduced the swipe option to archive emails, snooze feature to read mail later and mute unimportant conversations. Mailbox used machine learning to anticipate and sort mails for the user to always show them the most relevant messages. Many of today's email services providers have incorporated Mailbox’s innovations into their product.

Stats

Category

Productivity

Country

United States

Started

In 2011

Closed

By 2015

Number of Founders

Two

Name of Founders

Gentry Underwood, Scott Cannon

Number of Employees

Between 501 And 1000

Number of Funding Rounds

1

Total Funding Amount

$5M

Number of Investors

6

Precise Cause of Failure

Bad Business Model

Business Outcome

Shut Down

Cause of Failure

One month after the
official launch, Dropbox bought Mailbox stating that this sleek app would be a
great addition to their collaborative products.

Already
as a standalone product, the Mailbox team showed creativity and technical
skills in their product design, but being able to monetize the app was another
matter. Just as with calendars app, mailboxes might be useful for people, but
only to a certain point. People are not willing to pay for such products, nor
expect to. The only way similar products could make money or return the
invested money is by being acquired. However, even this did not work out too
well for Mailbox. A couple of years after the acquisition, Mailbox shutdown as
Dropbox could not find a way to integrate it into their main product and
concept.

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Mailbox launched in early 2013 and was able to gather over 1 million registrations for its trial plan.
The app promised to make your inbox more manageable, fast and efficient. It introduced the swipe option to archive emails, snooze feature to read mail later and mute unimportant conversations. Mailbox used machine learning to anticipate and sort mails for the user to always show them the most relevant messages. Many of today's email services providers have incorporated Mailbox’s innovations into their product.

Cause of Failure

One month after the
official launch, Dropbox bought Mailbox stating that this sleek app would be a
great addition to their collaborative products.

Already
as a standalone product, the Mailbox team showed creativity and technical
skills in their product design, but being able to monetize the app was another
matter. Just as with calendars app, mailboxes might be useful for people, but
only to a certain point. People are not willing to pay for such products, nor
expect to. The only way similar products could make money or return the
invested money is by being acquired. However, even this did not work out too
well for Mailbox. A couple of years after the acquisition, Mailbox shutdown as
Dropbox could not find a way to integrate it into their main product and
concept.